


hearts as big as the world we inherit

by PenzyRome



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Coming of Age, F/F, Falling In Love, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, Self-Acceptance, all the girls?? wlw, girls supporting each other and forming bad-ass friend groups, i actually dont have many tags for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 12:13:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14020005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenzyRome/pseuds/PenzyRome
Summary: Katherine Pulitzer, and how she switched schools, fell in love, and years later, was unashamed of the journey she'd taken.





	hearts as big as the world we inherit

**Author's Note:**

> "there was no warning of this" "no there was not"

Katherine Pulitzer starts talking at only a year old. Her parents’ friends say she is smart, and that she’ll grow up to be a beautiful young lady. Katherine doesn’t understand any of this. She doesn’t understand that she is very different from her parents, not just because they don’t share the same blood.

Katherine Pulitzer is two and a half when she begins reading. She is three when she begins writing. She never stops.

Katherine Pulitzer is four when she starts kindergarten, and goes to school for the next seventeen years of her life. She goes to a prissy private school where children learn about capitalism and benefit from nepotism from day one. She only meets one friend her three years there: a boy named Mush Meyers. He shares her Oreos with her, and she decides that if she  _ has  _ to marry a boy, it will be Mush. Boys are mean and rude and get away with it, but Mush is sweet and funny and while she doesn’t like-like him, she can imagine he’d be good at handling taxes.

In second grade, she gets in a fight when a boy calls her a sissy. She kicks him in the knees in front of the swings, and next thing she knows, she’s at another private school, told by her father to be good this time, or else. She makes another friend there, a girl whom everyone calls Buttons. Buttons is funny in a gross kind of way and wants to be a doctor, and Katherine likes the idea of marrying her  _ far _ more than she likes the idea of marrying a boy.

Third grade, she hears the word “gay” for the first time. Girls who like girls and boys who like boys. Normal and natural, says her teacher, who shows a picture of her and a smiling woman with two dogs and a little girl. Katherine is mesmerized by the domesticity of it, and tells her father as soon as she gets home. 

Three weeks later, she’s at a new private school, this one with a stricter dress code and church services every day. Katherine hates it. She doesn’t hate God, she promises, but she doesn’t think God would want her to feel bad like church makes her feel.

Fourth grade, at the same stuffy Catholic school, she hears the word “feminist”. It is thrown by a fifth grader with a buzz cut and an ugly sneer. Katherine looks it up.  _ Feminist: one who believes women and men should be treated the same way, with equal rights. _ Katherine doesn’t understand why equal is bad and thrown like an insult.

Still, she doesn't mention the word to her father. Better for him not to know she’s learning faster than he thinks.

In fifth grade, she is put in charge of the class newspaper. What she can put in it is monitored strictly, and she’s never allowed to mention feminists or being gay or any of the things she wonders about and thinks she might be. It’s a little seed that plants inside of her and never quite leaves. The school goes until high school, and her father would have kept it there, had it not been for The Incident.

Katherine’s best and perhaps only friend there, Rafaela, is quite possibly the coolest girl Katherine has ever met. She has sort of curly hair that went to her shoulders and dark skin and eyes that were a deep brown like someone could dive into them. She and Katherine stick out like sore thumbs, amidst a sea of pale boys and pale girls, the two dots of always-knotted dark hair at every assembly. So naturally, they are the closest of friends.

Rafaela is also excellent at sports. Katherine isn’t very good, but Rafaela tells her how to kick a soccer ball and hold a tennis racket and Katherine isn’t sure why it made her cheeks hot, but she likes it. They play soccer once in P.E., a little scrimmage between two groups of girls, and when Katherine by some fluke of nature kicks it into the goal at the end, and Rafaela slings an arm over her shoulder to cheer, it feels like second nature to kiss her.

That is Katherine’s first kiss: she is ten years old, surrounded by kids who thought “gay” was a dirty word, and kissing the only other girl at the school who isn’t white. They are clumsy and terrified, and it lasts less than a second before they are pushed away from each other.

They both are pulled out of the school. Rafaela’s parents because they are scared of what the other kids will do, and Katherine’s parents because they are furious. Her father screams at her, telling her she’s lucky he brought her into his home, is this how she repays him, things that sink like her brain is quicksand. Luckily, Katherine is smart. She creates a new email and shares it with Rafaela the last time they see each other in person. They email back and forth until they see each other again, five years later.

And so, she begins middle school at her first ever public school. Middle school is hard: she’s haunted by the idea of kissing girls, and marrying girls, and she doesn’t have many friends.

She has two comforts: her best friend, Jojo, and writing. Jojo is sweet and reads a lot of books and color-coordinates everything from her shoes to her hijabs and has big glasses that she shoves up her nose when she criticizes movies. She’s sarcastically funny, and Katherine as a middle schooler is absolutely enamoured with her. 

(“I may have been a little bit in love with you, in a pre-teen way,” Katherine told her years later, and Jojo laughed and said that she was the exact same way.)

Katherine doesn’t find out until seventh grade that Jojo dances, and insists on coming to all of her performances. She writes “reviews” that are just her gushing about Jojo’s talent, and Jojo frames all of them, putting them up in her closet right next to her rack of hijabs and scarves of every color imaginable.

When middle school is done, the two head off to high school, and Katherine, for the first time, feels like she belongs somewhere. She takes journalism classes and thrives, and she makes more friends. 

God, she makes so many more friends. This can all be blamed on Jojo, who introduces her to David Jacobs, and by default, Jack Kelly. 

(They’re honestly the best of best friends that Katherine’s ever met, the perfect sort of contrast where they never run out of things to talk about and agree on everything they have to but are so, so different, David being clever and book-smart and quick as a whip but perpetually tired, while Jack is content to let David do the talking but very street-smart and filled with boundless charm. It is apparent from her first thirty seconds of talking with them that they absolutely adore each other.)

And from there, it’s Charlie Morris, and then Racetrack Higgins, whom she never learns the actual name of, and then Albert and Elmer and Hildy and Finch and… so many of them.

It’s a surprise, though, that she meet Sarah Jacobs last. David is definitely the one out of her new friends that she spent the most time with, but when she thinks hard, it makes sense. They barely ever hang out at David’s house, and Sarah and Katherine float in completely different circles. Katherine is rich but black and closeted and Sarah is poor but outgoing and popular and the most out out lesbian Katherine has ever met. So honestly, the two of them not meeting until junior year makes a bit of sense.

They’re friends first, and they become close friends quickly. Before they know it, Jojo and Sarah and Katherine are a tight trio, eating lunch together and stopping by Starbucks after school and trying to figure out recipes that are both halal and kosher for Jojo and Sarah.

Katherine’s father leaves town for a weekend, and like any sensible teenager who hates her family, she throws a party. It’s more peaceful on the spectrum of high school parties, just her friends, from every school she’s been to so far. It works better than she expected: everyone gets along, based on David and Mush throwing an impromptu karaoke session. What works better than she ever could have dreamed, though, is how Buttons and Rafaela instantly fit into her tiny group of best friends. Before long, it’s five of them that are hanging out with each other on weekends, and on one special occasion on a Thursday when Buttons’s parents are convinced to tell the other parents that they’re at her house, the five steal off and go to a Hayley Kiyoko concert together. (The highlight of the evening is Rafaela sprinting out of Catholic school, still in her uniform, and changing into a crop top and skirt in the back of Katherine’s car. She winks when she sees Buttons and Jojo staring.) 

And then spring becomes summer, and they only have a year left. The day before school starts again, the five of them lounge out on the grass behind Rafaela’s house and cloudwatch. Buttons is holding Rafaela and Jojo’s hands tightly, the three form a little cluster together. Sarah and Katherine lay next to each other, gazing up at the sky, and it finally hits Katherine that there isn’t a single place in the world that she would rather be. Sarah glances over and grins at her and Katherine feels herself crumble inside.

Loving Sarah Jacobs is the worst and best thing that ever happens to her.

For a month on end, she stammers her way through conversations, avoiding one-on-one hanging out with Sarah as much as humanly possible until Sarah snaps.

It’s awful and ugly, and Katherine’s so glad that the school day ended a half hour before because they scream at each other, the first real fight they ever have. Tears at some point start falling, and when Sarah sobs, “Why won’t you just tell me what I did wrong!” with her voice hoarse and broken, something inside Katherine rips in two.

She can’t even stop herself. “I’m in love with you.”

She says it in a rush and spits it out like the words taste like castor oil. They almost do, and immediately she feels like she’s ripped off a bandage, and she’s bleeding out onto the linoleum. It’s the most exposed she’s ever felt, and it feels like admitting a sin. Sarah steps forward hesitantly, her mouth slightly open in shock, and Katherine finds herself not moving back or running away.

And then they’re kissing, and every yelling voice in Katherine’s head fades to static for the first time. It’s heated and so much at one time and Katherine can taste strawberry lip gloss and it feels like being safe for the first time in years.

Sarah pulls back with a gasp for air and presses their foreheads together. When she speaks, it’s nothing more than a breath. “I’ve been a little gone for you since I met you.”

Katherine laughed, leaning forward to kiss her softly. “I’m breaking my father’s heart.”

And it’s just then that she realizes she doesn’t care. 

She’s sending applications to schools all over the country soon. Everywhere from Massachusetts to California. She’ll get scholarships, she’ll take out loans. But she doesn’t need her father. She doesn’t want her father. She needs herself, and she wants Sarah.

And she wants to be happy.

She wants to accept herself. She wants to love a girl without her stomach hurting. 

Senior year is the best year of her life. It doesn’t matter that she has to hide who she is when she goes home. It doesn’t matter she gets funny looks whenever she walks down the hallway holding Sarah’s hand. She’s actually, genuinely happy, like the thing that’s been eating away at her since kindergarten has finally left.

And there’s college applications, and letters that tell you how the next four years of your life will go, and decisions, and debates. Katherine stresses for weeks, checking the mailbox every day when she gets home and crossing her fingers that she’s promising enough without her father’s approval. 

Jojo decides first. Honestly, she decides the moment she gets her acceptance letter from FIDM. (Katherine can’t bear thinking out the words “Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising”.) She shrieks so high birds almost fall out of the sky when she sees the envelope in her mailbox, and kisses Buttons and Rafaela on the cheeks for luck before she opens it and whoops. 

Rafaela decides next, debating for hours over softball teams from Florida and New York and Georgia before she gets her final letter and almost cries. She’s the only one who gets a full ride: a softball scholarship taking her to UCLA, where she’ll study psychology and maybe, she says, minor in kinesiology. She’s not sure yet. Jojo actually cries and kisses her so hard Rafaela almost falls down, and the two laugh their asses off.

Sarah decides a few days afterwards after a week of making so many charts that Katherine’s head hurt. Finally, she smacks her dry erase marker on the table with a triumphant sound. “I’ve done it!” she announces, and when Katherine rolls her hand for a name, she says, “Boston Architectural College!” so happily that Katherine can’t help but kiss her.

(If you’d told her ten years ago that she’d be kissing her aspiring architect girlfriend, she wouldn’t have believed you, but it’s the life she’s living.)

Buttons decides, finally, with as much bravado as she always does. David Geffen School of Medicine, she tells everyone, and Rafaela cries when she finds out that she’s going to Los Angeles with her girlfriends, and Katherine couldn’t be happier for them.

But what about her?

Katherine expected to get into some of the colleges that she applied to. She expected a UC or two, maybe even an Ivy League. She does not expect a Rory Gilmore moment, a mailbox full of envelopes that tell her “Congratulations!”.

She doesn’t even have to take too long deciding. Harvard has been her dream for years. When she tells the others, Sarah squeals and kisses her with such a force that Katherine’s legs turn to jello.

Katherine doesn’t believe in happily ever after, but she believes in happy for the first time when she moves away from her father and into a Massachusetts apartment with her girlfriend.

 

Katherine has been teaching at Harvard University for seven years, which does not fail to escape David Jacobs as hilariously ironic. It throws her off to see him standing in the doorway of her classroom, and as soon as she fumbles through a “goodbye” and college students stream out, she jerks a hand to invite him in. He walks in, looking around as if her thought he’d see a remnant of Katherine Pulitzer, Age Seventeen. He catches a glimpse of her desk and grins, finding it.

“Are you still in touch with them?” he asks, pointing at the picture right next to the plaque proclaiming her  _ Professor Katherine Plumber _ .

“You look good,” she offers, and he generously lets her change the subject. He looks down and shrugs, but she finds she actually means it. In high school, David was young, but always tired, with bags under his eyes deeper than the Grand Canyon. Now, he looks older, more mature, but more youthful. He looks… happier. She glances down at his hand and nods towards it.

“Jacobs-Kelly, now?” she asks, and he beams before it falters.

“I sent you an invitation, but…” he waves his hand, and she nods. He picks up on the meaning without having to ask, and for that, she’s grateful. “So. The original question?”

_ Damn him. _

She doesn’t know why, of ever picture she has, that’s the one she chose. She’s grown up, she’s 28, for Christ’s sake. It doesn’t make sense to have a picture of her with her high school best friends positioned next to her name.

She bites her lip. “I talk to Jojo sometimes, and because of it, Raf and Buttons.” 

She almost hates them for being so perfect for each other. They moved out to LA, met another girl named Joey, and started dating her too. Buttons dropped out of college and struck out in improv before she got a tour deal. Her show was put on Netflix, and before she knew it, Katherine was watching her first crush on late night talk shows and every streaming service known to man. Rafaela played semi-pro for a few years before she went back to UCLA and was hired to coach there. Before she knew it, Katherine was watching her second crush on SportsCenter and seeing her when her coworkers wrote out columns on softball. Jojo graduated with honors and was immediately thrown into a world of runways and contracts and before she knew it, Katherine was watching her third crush appear in Vogue and fancy French magazines. Joey, the subject of almost every email Katherine had received in their freshman year, was hired to edit a small indie film, then another, then bigger action movies, and before she knew it, Katherine was recognizing the name of a woman she’d never met in Oscar-winning films’ credits.

Sarah graduated and was hired into a firm not too long afterwards. She and Katherine dated for a year after they graduated, and then Katherine got a letter from her father congratulating her on her success in journalism. If she wanted to return to New York, it said, a spot at The World was hers. At the end, a postscript was added, asking her if she was seeing anyone.

Katherine’s response was curt and to-the-point: she didn’t want a job, and she was doing fine, thank you. 

She didn’t know why she added a postscript, but right before she sealed the envelope, she included:

_ And no, I’m not seeing anyone. _

She wasn’t sure why she had been ashamed. But when Sarah had found out, that had made her more ashamed than anything else. Seeing her girlfriend of six years ask, in tears, if Katherine was still embarrassed of being with her was probably the first blow.

All Katherine knows is that a month later, Sarah moved to Orlando to head the architectural firm for some amusement park and Katherine went back to college.

David snaps his fingers, and Katherine looks up, snapped out of a trance. “Earth to Katherine?”

She shakes her head rapidly and tries for a plastic smile. “Sorry about that. What were you saying?” He sighs and shakes his head.

“I was just wondering how you were. It’s been a while, y’know? I had to  _ Google you, Katherine. _ It was humiliating!”

She laughs, and it feels so natural to talk to him again that she can almost imagine that she’s seventeen. “I missed you, Jacobs-Kelly. I’d ask where you are, but…”

David snorts. David Jacobs-Kelly, winner of the National Book Award, living in Santa Cruz with his husband and two dogs and a little girl. Katherine would have known how he was doing even if he didn’t have the world’s best twitter. 

“How’s… how’s Sarah?” she asks slowly, and David smiles like he knew something she didn’t. (He probably did.)

“She’s doing great. Redesigned some buildings for the Kennedy Space Center, has a really nice house down near Cape Canaveral… she’s still single.”

“Davey,” Katherine cuts in with a firm glare, and he relents. 

“She hasn’t changed her phone number, you know. You could just call if you want to know how she’s doing.” She glares again, and he shrugs. “Just a point. Want to grab lunch?”

David has a suspicious level of knowledge when it came to making his way around Cambridge. When she asks, he waves his hand. “I wrote a novel set in Massachusetts, remember? I ended up coming here a lot to grab a bite to eat before plotting out how the hell Jenna was going to get back home in the smallest possible period of time.” Katherine nods, because it makes sense, and then sighs. 

“Assholes ahead.” David looks forward and groans.

“Isn’t this town supposed to be… I don’t know, pretty liberal?”

“You’d think,” she says briskly, “but they’ve been here since January.”

The “they” in question are a white couple wearing red hats and handing out fliers. Katherine likes to think that she and David look obviously Not Conservative enough to be avoided, but no.

“Hello! Would you like to talk about Preside--” the woman offers, and Katherine shoves the fliers back towards them.

“Lady, we’re both gay. Goodbye!”

They walk about fifteen feet before David starts  _ cackling _ . Katherine shoves him in the shoulder, and he just starts laughing harder. It takes another thirty for him to stop and speak.

“Their… their faces! Oh my  _ god!” _ He punches her arm. “Katherine Plumber, you are a  _ genius _ .”

She shrugs modestly. “I try my best.”

He shakes his head, still fighting off laughter, and then sobers so quickly it’s like he saw a dead possum. “You’re… okay with it now? With being… uncensored? To everyone?”

Katherine looks around, at tall buildings and dreams taller than skyscrapers. Dreams and futures that don't just scrape the sky, they shatter it. People who are themselves and don't hide from anyone, regardless of what “anyone” will think.

She wants that. She wants dreams as big as skyscrapers and people to share those dreams with.

She thinks about her phone, filled to the brim, with “Sarah” still hid deep within it. No last name like her other contacts to remind her of who it was, because if she ever sees that contact, she’ll know exactly who it was.

She takes a deep breath. “Yeah. I really am.”

He looks over at her as she pulls out her phone and considers the contacts app. 

“I’m really proud of you, Kath.”

She smiles and types a quick reminder to herself. 

_ Call her. _

“I am, too.”

And she finds that she is.

She’s proud.

**Author's Note:**

> i love kath. thanks for coming to my tedtalk.  
> anyways!! i had a url change, so my tumblr is @penzyroamin now! come say hi, give me prompts, request fics, etc!  
> i really hope you all enjoyed this, it's been my baby for weeks now and im actually proud of it for some reason. (aka please validate me if you leave comments i'll cry)  
> have a lovely day/night etc, stay awesome <3


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